TENDER’s fourth album, Where the Waves Break, is a story of light and dark. Contained in these 14 songs, the most focused and ambitious the south coast duo have ever written, is the push and pull between our hope for good and unfortunate but inevitable capacity for ugly. Since forming in 2015, the duo – James Cullen and Dan Cobb – have become masters of balancing bedroom pop intimacy with festival-sized ambition, with their superbly composed alt-pop songs gaining fans in NPR, Stereogum and beyond as well as hundreds of millions of streams. A steady progression and refinement of their sound followed on debut album Modern Addiction (2017) and follow-up Fear of Falling Asleep (2019). On 2023’s Flux, they beautifully told the story of becoming first-time fathers at similar times, as well as Cullen’s stressful ordeal to bypass travel bans to be there for the birth of his child in New York. With their personal lives more settled and both members now based on the south coast – Cobb in Brighton and Cullen in Portsmouth – the creation of Where the Waves Break is a story of reconnection with their beginnings, and another renewed testament to their unique and unbreakable musical chemistry. Where the Waves Break is an album that interrogates the opposing sides of all humans, from our brightest moments to our dark and difficult corners. The method of the album’s arrival is consistent with its core theme – trying your best while knowing that sometimes you have to submit to the unknowability of the world with all its light and shade. On Where The Waves Break, TENDER have made an incomparable document of this fundamental part of life.
